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Christina Hoff Sommers was a professor of philosophy at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, when her first book, Who Stole Feminism?, was published. That book, the thesis of which Sommers had laid out in a provocative Atlantic Monthly article, catapulted her to public prominence (and generated a bushel of politically correct hate-mail). Sommers has since forsaken the groves of academe for think tankery; currently she is the W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Her new book, The War Against Boys, has generated even more controversy than its predecessor did. (For an exchange between Sommers and her critics, see the Letters section of the August issue of the Atlantic.) Michael Cromartie met with her in Washington to talk about the book.
What is the war against boys?
Boys are politically incorrect. They like action, competition, rough-housing. They are the one group of Americans who do not spend a lot of time talking about their feelings. This worries many people. A group of psychologists— mainly at Harvard—have convinced themselves that boys need to be "rescued" from their masculinity. At the same time, hard-line feminists are persuaded that unless we intervene at earliest possible age to change boys, women and girls will continue to be "oppressed under patriarchy." My book shows that these two groups—the gender warriors and the New England psychologists—have been astonishingly successful in promoting their male-averse programs in the schools. In the meantime, boys are not getting the help they really need. All the special help has been allocated to girls.
Many books have come out in the last ten years or so that report a pervasive malaise among young women and adolescent girls. Is your book intended as a corrective to these diagnoses?
Those books have had two bad effects. They overstated how bad things are for girls, and they distracted everyone's attention from the problems of boys. Contrary to Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia, American girls are not "crashing and burning." They are not shortchanged, demoralized, or silenced. We are not a "girl-poisoning" culture.
I do not like to criticize Mary Pipher. She is well-intentioned and I am sure an excellent therapist. But she should not have depicted American girls in tragic terms. Their story is the very opposite of tragedy. They are flourishing in unprecedented ways. They are way ahead of boys academically and socially. They have more freedoms and more opportunities than any young women in history.
There are, of course, plenty of problems. We could do a much better job educating our children and, teaching them about right and wrong. But it is simply wrong to attribute mental pathology to most of them. Are they depressed? Despondent? Wracked by anxiety? No, not most of them.
Where did this myth of the fragile girl originate?
I think it originated with the psychologist Carol Gilligan, Harvard's first professor of gender studies, whose best-known book, In a Different Voice, was published in 1982. Gilligan argues that in our society, no one is interested in what girls have to say. She says that girls learn, at the age of 13 or 14, that the system is rigged against them. The "patriarchy" is assigning them an inferior place. Girls, according to Gilligan, are silenced when they hit the "wall of Western culture"—whatever that's supposed to mean.
Well, American girls are not silenced. They are arguably among the most outspoken people in the world. To call this generation of opinionated, ambitious, animated, and delightful girls diminished wallflowers is madness. Nothing could be further from the truth. But that myth was aggressively promoted by several women's groups and in a growing list of best-selling books. It has become the conventional wisdom.
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